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Sanders Poll Sends Clear Message to Harris: Pro-Worker Policies Are 'Also Good Politics' | Common Dreams
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this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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Overall pretty promising results, but the one that baffles me is the majority opposition to cutting military spending. Maybe I'm in a bubble but who the fuck looks at current spending levels and thinks that's a good thing, especially now that we aren't even at war. I guess the new cold war is ramping up with China but last I checked were still spending orders of magnitude more then them.
I always thought support for military spending was shallow and manufactured by the military industrial complex, but these polls seem to show a lot of people actually strongly support military spending. Looks like age is the biggest contributing factor, with under 45 supporting cuts while over 45 strongly opposing cuts. Maybe it's a cold war thing, of nostalgia and pride for the Reagan / top gun era american empire.
Perhaps it's manufactured well. I wonder how large of an employer is it. I can find data that shows it's in the millions of jobs but I don't know how many.
I think the Ukraine situation does more to increase the favorability of military spending than anything with China.
But mostly I think America being late to intervene in WWII still hangs over the American public's heads (to me it would seem this is the point when anti-interventionism stopped being the norm.)
The problem is that we don't really need to add money to make the country more secure. What we need to do is change the way the supplies are handled and it's save billions. When I was in, (02-08) I was talking to the SSG of the cooks and he complained that a microwave cost the unit $1,100. If instead he was able to just use cash from an account, he could have gotten the same one for $300. But instead he had to use the system in place. Everything cost WAY more than it should. This doesn't include mass supplies like clothing, guns and ammo, but regular items. If we could change that, we would be able to cut a little bit of funding and still save billions for development of new tech.
I wonder if Ukraine is having an effect on attitudes.
Anyway, I can't speak for others, but one thing I've come to realize through life experiences is that the best way to resolve differences is to behave civilly and talk. BUT. I've also seen that there are people who do not ascribe to or live by my preferences and ideals for this. There are people who don't value rationality, there are people who can't be shamed or pressured by society into behaving nicely and getting along with others. Those people respect the stick, and only the stick. I don't want to use the stick. But these people do not live by my ideals (which are to talk things out and behave civilly), no matter how I say pretty please to them, and it's foolish to project my values onto them when I see with my own eyes that they behave and react in patterns different to my own. They respect things that scare them or directly threaten them only, and continue to misbehave if all they're going to get for it is a finger-wagging and a scolding.
So it seems very wise to "speak softly and carry a big stick". The military is our stick. There are people out there who will behave in the most horrific uncivil ways right up until the moment they realize you have a big stick, then they'll suddenly rein themselves in, and you can then be civil and talk things out. But that opportunity to talk doesn't appear unless you actually have the stick when you're dealing with folks of that sort of mentality.
It's very important to look at your opponents with clear eyes and see what they ARE doing, not what you wish they would do, and not what you would do if you were in their shoes. As the saying goes, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them."